Top 180 Peter S. Beagle Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Man searches constantly for identity, he thought as he trotted along the gravel path. He has no real proof of this existence except for the reaction of other people to that fact. So he listens very closely to what people say to one another about him, whether it’s good or bad, because it indicates that he lives in the same world they do, and that all his fears about being invisible, impotent, lacking some mysterious dimension that other people have, are groundless.”

— Peter S. Beagle

102. “You may plant your acres again and raise up your fallen orchard and vineyards, but they will never flourish as they used to, never – until you learn to take joy in them, for no reason.”

— Peter S. Beagle

103. “As to your first question, no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.”

— Peter S. Beagle

104. “I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself.”

— Peter S. Beagle

105. “The magician was studying her face with his green eyes. “Your face is wet,” he said worriedly. “I hope that’s spray. If you’ve become human enough to cry, then no magic in the world – oh, it must be spray. Come with me. It had better be spray.”

— Peter S. Beagle

106. “The unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I’m never going to see, but it doesn’t matter, because now I have seen it, and it’s beautiful, and I was in there too.”

— Peter S. Beagle

107. “The secret of my long life is that nothing has ever been dull for me. For all my life I have been interested in everything I saw and been anxious to see more. But I cannot stand to be bored, and I will not go to parties at which I expect to be bored, especially if they are my own. Therefore, to my next ball I shall invite one guest I am sure no one, not even myself, could possibly find boring. My friends, the guest of honor at my next party shall be Death himself.”

— Peter S. Beagle

108. “I love you,” Laura said hopelessly. “I’d love you if you were afraid of everything in the world.”

— Peter S. Beagle

109. “Ah. My story. Are you certain you wish to hear it? It is long, unlikely, and remarkably unedifying – shameful, even, to come from a minister’s lips. Blasphemous, too, properly regarded.”

— Peter S. Beagle

110. “And at last she woke up in the middle of one warm night and said, “Yes, but now.”

— Peter S. Beagle

111. “I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn’s roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees.”

— Peter S. Beagle

112. “There is only one spot in me that is as warm and placid as those cattle, and that is the part that knows quite surely that I will always be cold, that there will always be a wind hunting through me, and that I will always be hurrying before the coming darkness in search of a place that is not there.”

— Peter S. Beagle

113. “I hate selkie stories. They’re always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said “What’s this?“, and you never saw your mom again.”

— Peter S. Beagle

114. “Oh, more people than not have some magic, they just forget about it. Children use it all the time – what do you think jump rope rhymes are, or bouncing ball games, or cat’s cradles? Where do you think that girl, Aiffe, draws her power? Because she refuses to forget, that’s all it is.”

— Peter S. Beagle

115. “What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place.”

— Peter S. Beagle

116. “That’s the true test of a town, or of a king. A lord who cheats an ugly old witch will cheat his own folk by and by. Stop him while you can, before you grow used to him.”

— Peter S. Beagle

117. “He knew something of sorrow, remembered joy, and devoutly hoped – as much as he consciously hoped for anything other than proper allotments of sunshine and rainfall – never again to encounter either of those two old annoyances.”

— Peter S. Beagle

118. “You must remind me, little one. When I... when I lose myself – when I lose her – you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting... that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place... I sit... because a king has to sit, you see... but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her...”

— Peter S. Beagle

119. “It’s not you worries me. The king is a good man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even more than other people, kings change.”

— Peter S. Beagle

120. “This world, that world, doesn’t matter. You never make people to see what you see, hear, feel what you feel. Notes don’t do it, words don’t do it, paints, bronze, marble, nothing. All you can do, you maybe get it a little close, a little closer. But right, like you’re talking? No.”

— Peter S. Beagle

121. “No, my friend,” he responded finally. “I am not God, no more than you. But I think you and I are equally part of God as we stand here,” and he swept his arm wide to take in all the slow, dark shiver of the sea as it breathed under the blue and silver morning. “Surely we two are not merely surrounded by this divine splendor – we both belong to it, we are of it, now and for always. How else should it be?”

— Peter S. Beagle

122. “I think that we are often angry with each other without knowing it, and I know that we are angry with ourselves.”

— Peter S. Beagle

123. “No,” he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king’s voice... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.”

— Peter S. Beagle

124. “She touched you twice,′ he said in a little while. ‘The first touch was to bring you to life again, but the second was for you.”

— Peter S. Beagle

125. “The king is always watching her out of his pale eyes, wondering what she is, and the king’s son wounds himself with loving her and wonders who she is. And every day she searches the sea and the sky, the castle and the courtyard, the keep and the king’s face, for something she cannot always remember. What is it, what is it that she is seeking in this strange place? She knew a moment ago, but she has forgotten.”

— Peter S. Beagle

126. “They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last – these people who know that nothing lasts.”

— Peter S. Beagle

127. “The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone, and he was grateful, knowing very well how rare such a bargain is, and how rarely kept. And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them.”

— Peter S. Beagle

128. “I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is. What could I ever search for in the world, except this again?”

— Peter S. Beagle

129. “I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns, or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else-what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?”

— Peter S. Beagle

130. “All right, all right for you, you pretentious kneecap! How would you like a punch in the eye?”

— Peter S. Beagle

131. “The torches went out, and in the darkness, he placed his lips to my ear. “I believe you because I choose to; not because I do.”

— Peter S. Beagle

132. “You deserve the services of a great wizard,” he said to the unicorn, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to be glad of the aid of a second-rate pickpocket.”

— Peter S. Beagle

133. “She loved him too. That’s why she let him go.”

— Peter S. Beagle

134. “So let’s say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don’t let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he’s getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends.”

— Peter S. Beagle

135. “She came very close, and looking into my eyes, she said, “My Jenny,” and then she bent her head and kissed me – here, on the left-hand corner of my mouth. And nobody knows better than I that I couldn’t have felt anything, because Tamsin was a ghost – but nobody but me knows what I felt. And I’ll always know.”

— Peter S. Beagle

136. “How terrible to be forgotten by the god that made you, even if you’re just a room. How could you love something that could do that anytime?”

— Peter S. Beagle

137. “The sight of men filled her with an old, slow, strange mixture of tenderness and terror.”

— Peter S. Beagle

138. “You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it.”

— Peter S. Beagle

139. “The spaciousness of it astounds me; this is the kind of country you dream of running away to when you are very young and innocently hungry, before you learn that all land is owned by somebody, that you can get arrested for swinging through trees in a loincloth, and that you were born either too late or too poor for everything you want to do.”

— Peter S. Beagle

140. “For a moment she turned in a circle, staring at her hands, which she held high and useless, close to her breast. She bobbed and shambled like an ape doing a trick, and her face was the silly, bewildered face of a joker’s victim. And yet she could make no move that was not beautiful. Her trapped terror was more lovely than any joy that Molly had ever seen, and that was the most terrible thing about it.”

— Peter S. Beagle

141. “As for righting wrongs and fighting for civil liberties, that sort of thing, it wouldn’t be so bad... but then we have to sing those songs about wearing Lincoln green and aiding the oppressed. We don’t, Cully, we turn them in for the reward, and those songs are just embarrassing, that’s all, and there’s the truth of it.”

— Peter S. Beagle

142. “This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me.”

— Peter S. Beagle

143. “A good wife isn’t supposed to argue with her husband. My mother says you wait until he goes out, or he’s asleep, and then you do what you want.”

— Peter S. Beagle

144. “Do you know what I am, butterfly?” the unicorn asked hopefully, and he replied. “Excellent well, you’re a fishmonger. You’re my everything, you are my sunshine, you are old and gray and full of sleep, you’re my pickle-face, consumptive Mary Jane.” He paused, fluttering his wings against the wind, and added conversationally, “Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.”

— Peter S. Beagle

145. “No, my lady, you are wrong! Death lives among the poor. Death lives in the foulest, darkest alleys of this city, in some vile, rat-ridden hovel that smells of-” He stopped here, partly because he had never been inside such a hut or thought of wondering what it smelled like. “Death lives among the poor,” he went on, “and comes to visit them every day, for he is their only friend.”

— Peter S. Beagle

146. “I love whom I love.”

— Peter S. Beagle

147. “What kind of woman is it who believes – who knows, for I saw her face – that she can cure wounds with a touch, and who weeps without tears?” Molly.”

— Peter S. Beagle

148. “He would have cupped his hands around her smile and breathed it brighter, if he had dared.”

— Peter S. Beagle

149. “But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone.”

— Peter S. Beagle

150. “Oh, it’s a beautiful day, it’s an elegant, graceful day, and I’m sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I’m a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.”

— Peter S. Beagle